Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

She played hide and seek in a bombed house, got a first kiss, hid one day all but the side-part in her hair and the pale brown eyes the only moving thing as her father’s voice rose to a pitch she had not heard before which did not make her show herself but made her stay, a narrow face between textures of wrecked stone and as hard to see as I am on my lookout site keeping watch for those who have gone into the building’s shadowy forms and are to be warned by me if the other forces come from the street outside, so I’m important but I’m struck stationary between the two motions of those inside and those outside but I do not know enough about the two sides, can’t look at both at once; need power: to cope with (a) a wife who on the morning of my trip to Corsica called our film half-baked, and (b) my partner-friend whose view of our film was so haphazard that we had two films, my montage, his footage: yet a friend who, as with the 8-millimeter cartridge I somehow haven’t inquired into, so with his changed plans first to put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, and then August 4 or 5 instead to cut the SSP into the Marvelous Country House, seemed to know something I didn’t, yet even now that I’ve found his collusive letter to Claire, Dagger seems not to know too much to be my friend. He must have wished to say something by means of that snapshot Jenny packed between the black sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of medicated shampoo in the filmed suitcase that I now see recalls uncannily Lorna’s suitcase in a third scene in our bedroom, a suitcase that, like a poignant still picture invulnerable to the motions around it, remained half-packed on a chair for three days in 1958 when Lorna was leaving and not leaving, dreaming me with crystal clarity dead, not hearing what I said to her, wishing herself asleep for good: until on the third night (which was a week before she met Tessa) I lay on our bed preparing to dream the lookout dream and wondering what to do to the building-site watchman who is recovering consciousness after the blow on his head — and found that Lorna was now unpacking the case she’d half-packed three days before back into our less orderly life together.

But now in Glasgow wondering where Cosmo’s Indian was spending the night, and whether the Druid through his connections had put Dagger in danger, and thinking what from my suitcase should I pack in my new rucksack, I knew that I would keep going and that if Cosmo’s Indian who’d awed Cosmo by saying he lived only in the present turned up at this old hotel door in Scotland I would collar him and find a way back through his recent acts to my most practical course in the Hebrides tomorrow.

But I thought he’d wait. I jammed a chair under the door knob, killed the light, lay down, heard approaching my building site the quiet voices in the street of those who were opposed to the small squad at work inside for whom I was standing watch; and heroism seemed not so much unlikely as encumbered with tasks and timetables, names and address books: the injured watchman stirs beside a long I-beam: Dudley corrects Tessa at a Mexican restaurant (Kokulcan did not simply arise in Yucatan as a Mayan god reborn from the Aztec Quetzlcoatl — Kokulcan arose quite probably through rumor collaborating round the figure of a bearded priest-ruler who took the name of Quetzlcoatl and as a result priests of a rival god Tetzcatlipoca expelled the impostor and he may have made his way to the sea and disappeared to the east on a raft, or —and we note a decisiveness in Dudley’s very lack of certainty — this bearded Toltec exile may have detoured on the mainland instead, for about this time Kokulcan who has some but not all of Quetzlcoatl’s characteristics first shows himself among the Maya of Yucatan).

I did not feel much like a god on my Glasgow bed. I found myself swelling to fill the spaces between me and the two forces, yet contracting too as to make some space between me and the rest. The squad inside were committing a subtle robbery and wiring a thunderclap invented unknown to them by me, and they were taking too long about it. The watchman we’d coshed was reaching groggily to hold his forehead or rub his eyes, and for the first time in my mind he was a recently discharged veteran from a big Italian family in Brooklyn. Tessa’s bombed houses were the third of those moments that placed her in my film diary if not in the Marvelous Country House where Dagger had found something to make him wish to cut into it the Suitcase Slowly Packed which would in my own vision of the film be as unplaced as the MCH or for that matter the Unplaced Room, or the pad of paper on which I’d written Claire the false lead “Gulf of Honduras” then circled it.

I was near sleep and near the end of my preparation to dream my lookout dream, and the bombers led by a man in a beard and a black sweater inside the shadowed geometries of the great unfinished building were in fact a revolutionary group. But, like an Indian rapping on my hotel door, the dim snapshot that had fallen from Reid’s book and that Jenny had quickly packed turned into a picture hung in two places, and that picture was the oil of Jan Aut’s that I’d noticed in Monty’s living room because of the black-and-white photo next to it whose framed glass reflected my face and I’d disparaged the oil hoping to lure her brother into telling me something — and the other place I’d seen it was May 24 in a rough neighborhood of London in the Unplaced Room that Dagger and I had depictured and whose address I now saw congruent with an address I had written on our hall table in Highgate and now here on a scrap of paper in Glasgow, and it was the address of Jan: whom Dagger therefore knew.

But I placed my hand over my eyes and found a new detail of the lookout dream I was preparing to dream: the wakening watchman whom I might have to dispose of was one of three brothers, yes that was it: but as sleep reached to lock on my frequency for the night, Tessa’s hand was on my body pulling hairs, stretching latitude parallels up a thigh with her middle three fingers so pinkie and thumb stuck out like my Jenny signaling left and right from Reid’s motorbike (as if to say take a picture of anything but me) and Tessa was telling me the tale of the Moon and her three sons, and she sighed Kokulcan and I felt the wind and said if I am Gene’s brother Jack, then I am also Paul’s brother Jack.

And so as sleep did at last lock on and a breeze from Scotland crossed the sill onto my exposed feet, I had to end my preparing for the lookout dream as the unknown third brother Jack: and then I saw without preparation that I was going to be forced to kill the watchman.

But I was ready enough and felt in my relaxing shins and my collar of bone that if I didn’t dream my lookout dream now I never would.

I left my case at the hotel desk and paid my bill early when the lobby was empty. After breakfast I told the desk I was expecting a call from London at noon and could be found in the lobby. I paid a boy to check my rucksack at the bus terminal. I could not recall what pages if any were in my case.

I consulted the classified. At 9:30 when I strolled out in jeans and parka I found a booth and phoned a gunsmith’s and got the information I needed. I had the locker key and my compass in my pocket and nothing in my hands. I browsed at a news agent’s. A vacant cab turned into the block and when I saw the light green ahead, I jumped in and we went toward George Square. I asked the driver how many fares he could expect during the working day. We weren’t being followed so I asked for the bus terminal.

But an hour later when I appeared at the upper level of the airport terminal having left my pack at the weigh-in counter, the Indian was ahead of me standing at a news agent’s cash register reading a magazine. I didn’t glance at him again, and when I boarded the plane I took a forward seat.